Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/210

like shadows, down to the bottom. Like the pearl divers. But you keep bobbing up like a cork.”

Cipriano smiled subtly. He knew well enough.

“We’ve got to open the oyster of the cosmos, and get our manhood out of it. Till we’ve got the pearl, we are only gnats on the surface of the ocean,” said Ramón.

“My manhood is like a devil inside me,” said Cipriano.

“It’s very true,” said Ramón. That’s because the old oyster has him shut up, like a black pearl. You must let him walk out.”

“Ramón,” said Cipriano, “Wouldn’t it be good to be a serpent, and be big enough to wrap one’s folds round the globe of the world, and crush it like that egg?”

Ramón looked at him and laughed.

“I believe we could do that,” said Cipriano, a slow smile curling round his mouth. “And wouldn’t it be good?”

Ramón shook his head, laughing.

“There would be one good moment, at least,” he said.

“Who asks for more!” said Cipriano.

A spark flashed out of Ramón’s eyes too. Then he checked himself, and gathered himself together.

“What would be the good!” he said heavily. “If the egg was crushed, and we remained, what could we do but go howling down the empty passages of darkness. What’s the good, Cipriano?”

Ramón got up and walked away. The sun had set, the night was falling. And in his soul the great, writhing anger was alive again. Carlota provoked it into life: the two women seemed to breathe life into the black monster of his inward rage, till it began to lash again. And Cipriano stirred it up till it howled with desire.

“My manhood is like a demon howling inside me,” said Ramón to himself, in Cipriano’s words.

And he admitted the justice of the howling, his manhood being pent up, humiliated, goaded with insult inside him. And rage came over him, against Carlota, against Cipriano, against his own people, against all mankind, till he was filled with rage like the devil.

His people would betray him, he knew that. Cipriano would betray him. Given one little vulnerable chink, they would pierce him. They would leap at the place out of nowhere, like a tarantule, and bite in the poison.